Good news everybody! It’s still legal to suck disease straight down your throat, and it just got a whole lot sexier!

Word came down today that the smooth, rich flavor that just makes life worth living is now going to come in new, “edgier” goth doom packaging. Adorned in “labels that depict in graphic detail the negative health effects of tobacco use… the corpse of a smoker, diseased lungs, and a mother holding her baby with smoke swirling around them” and hip new catch phrases like “Smoking can kill you” and “Cigarettes cause cancer”… Hooray?

No shit...

This will of course do very little to curb smoking, likely as much as, say, distributing servings of heroin (that’s how they’re doled out, right? Serving sizes with nutritional information on the side? I haven’t caught up on my DVRed episodes of “The Oxycontin Express”, please, no spoilers) in mylar party balloons with the words “Don’t” scribbled on the side in the blood of your own children. See, we as Americans often do stupid shit, that’s kind of our thing. Not that smoking is strictly an American past time, ’cause it ain’t, but we know how to put our own particular child lock brand of insulting stupidity on it. It’s the American way.

There’s nothing in this latest move by the FDA about banning the sale of cigarettes or tobacco products. Nothing to remove from the shelves a product that is responsible for approximately 443,000 deaths a year. Their solution is simply to make the packs hard to look at and hope to scare smokers straight. By making half the pack look like a snuff film, telling them that “Eating poison will surely assassinate you” and giving them the 1-800 number to a stop smoking hot line, the FDA has done its job and made the world safe again. Smokers today are allowed to smoke legally only in a two foot square cabinet under their bathroom sink which upon moving must be shipped to a special cigarette nook disposal facility in North Dakota where it is then buried three miles deep under a thick protective layer of E.T. Atari 2600 game cartridges until Jesus can safely exorcise all of the inky black cancer vapors or the sun expands to the point of devouring the solar system and all life as we know it… Which ever comes first. Making the packs scary ain’t gonna stop smokers from smoking their smoke making smokes.

Debating whether or not cigarettes should be made illegal is pointless. They never will be. They’ll be $60 a pack and sold wrapped in photographs of the grandchildren that cancer will prevent you from ever meeting before they’re made illegal. Should they be? Well, the way I see it, the key to whether something should be illegal or not should be whether or not that something’s sale would be approved if it were presented as a brand new product today.

Chainsaw... it's what your face wants!

I personally have a product that has been proven to, if used properly, fucking murder you. When can I start selling this thing to children while telling anyone trying to arrest me that I am in no way trying to sell them to children? My new product is called “Chainsaw to the Face”. And just as the name suggests, it is the rich, refreshing taste of chainsaw, delivered conveniently and comfortably, directly to the god damned face. Chainsaws are legal, faces are most certainly still legal, despite all of big anti-face’s efforts to make them otherwise. Why couldn’t I sell boxes of “Chainsaw to the Face” in every gas station and drug store across God’s own free land. Go ahead FDA, slather it in warning labels if it’ll make you feel like you’re doing your job. Dip our boxes in pictures of the results of the use of our product: old people with their faces chainsawed off. “Chainsaw to the Face” is just too addictive, that’s why we secretly try to hook our customers when they’re young, to get the most possible “Chainsaw to the Face” years out of them before, inevitably, they are killed by the proper, clinical, only possible use of “Chainsaw to the Face”: a chainsaw to the face…

The only thing the FDA can think to do, or will be allowed to do, to a product that kills 1 in every 693 people in this country is to make half of the pack look like what will happen if you use what’s inside as directed. Nobody at this point in human history doesn’t know that cigarettes are bad for you. The last person born before packs of cigarette had to legally start telling people that they wanted to murder you for buying them, turned 56 this year. Seeing exactly how cigarettes plan on doing it every time you pick up your pack isn’t going to make many people suddenly realize that their sucking a dozen kinds of poison into their face might not be the best thing for them… They could start packaging cigarettes in people recently murdered by cigarettes and it would have little effect on their purchase power.

By the estimates of this article and of new studies 20% of Americans smoke: about 46 million Smokey-Americans. By implementing this new horrific labeling, the FDA, BY THEIR OWN ESTIMATES, believe they will reduce the number of smokers by 213,000 in 2013 “with smaller additional reductions through 2031”. So their big victory against tobacco is that by making half of the pack look like a cereal killer’s frigidaire, they are going to reduce the number of smokers in the United States by… wait for it… 0.46%! Twice as many people will still die in 2013 from smoking, as their new horror porn warning labels will save over the next 18 years…

The tobacco companies are laughing their tar covered balls off at you FDA.

Cigarettes got in on the ground floor of murdering Americans with their products. tobacco products have been killing Americans as long as there’ve been Americans. And if one of our nation’s original biggest exports had been cocaine of heroin or Chainsaws to the Face, then they would be just as inexorably entrenched in American commerce as the tobacco industry.

So good for you tobacco, you made yourself too important to have to give a shit that you’re murdering your customers and too big to be stopped. Good for you.

Well, the good news is that the asshole sitting in front of you who took that call in the middle of the super dramatic and or touching moment during the last half hour of the future Oscar nominated Kung Fu Panda 2 this Sunday afternoon, and who’s whispering voice is louder than most toddler wails, is going to die a horrible screaming death, unable to recognize even his closest loved ones as the thing growing in his head lurches one final time and mashes all that was him against the inside of his skull and explodes.

The bad news: so will all of the rest of us otherwise thoughtful, conscientious movie goers.

You see, in the future, your cell phone has murdered you already.

In the industrialized world, everything we eat, make, or look at is killing us, so it should come as no surprise that something we’ve often been told is probably killing us is probably killing us. Tuesday the World Health Organization released the results of a study that suggests that cell phones may cause cancer and are categorized as being as hazardous as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform, making them basically as dangerous as anything else made in China.

See, cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. The kind that the article describes, saying it like it’s a good thing, as “like a very low-powered microwave oven.”

“What microwave radiation does in most simplistic terms is similar to what happens to food in microwaves, essentially cooking the brain. So in addition to leading to a development of cancer and tumors, there could be a whole host of other effects like cognitive memory function, since the memory temporal lobes are where we hold our cell phones.”

We are holding tiny microwave ovens to our heads and nuking our memories.

Introducing the new iTumorer 4GT! Only $599 with contract!

So what will be done? Well, if you said “With the swiftness of the angels choir, we, the consumer, will take this new found knowledge, given to us by those looking out for our own best interest so that we might better preserve our personal well being, and use it in the manner intended, to protect ourselves from those who might instead have their own personal gain as their most prescient thought. While those responsible for the manufacture and sale of these products will surely see that theirs is a dangerous gadget and will redouble their efforts to safeguard their precious customers, of whom their entire existence relies, to ensure that in the future they are delivering nothing but the finest quality product for the money because it is what the customer deserves, and what they certainly don’t deserve is a brain full of cancers.” then you were clearly born sometime during the reading of this article and that the well reasoned and insightful response of a mind not privy to the selfishness and stupidity of the world that awaits you, while certainly sounding measured and clear in your newborn head instead likely came out only as a mouth full of goo followed by a scream fueled by your first breath of life.

The truth is of course that this will change absolutely nothing. We’ve known since the advent of the cell phone that holding something against our head that is shooting invisible beams into space which are in turn being shot right back through self same head at the speed of light probably isn’t the best thing we could be doing to it, but that doesn’t stop us from buying the newest one the second we are legally allowed to. Knowing that our phones are cooking our gray meat isn’t going to keep us from using them. Sure, I might get myself a new hands free ear bud, but then the second that stops working I’ll be pressing my skull roasting rectangle back to my face and jerkeying my memories again.

The simple fact of the matter is that they could call the damned thing the iTumorer 4GT and there would be a line around the block for it come release day just so long as it had three cameras, weighed a 64th of an ounce less and had 64gigs to put all of the music that we’d forgotten why we liked because that part of our brain now had the texture of over defrosted chicken.

The benzene is what gives it that smooth, full body flavor.

You know how many cigarettes are still sold in the world every day? Neither do I, because I’ve got more important things to do than count cigarettes, but the point is, there’s still a lot, and what’s crazy is that new people begin smoking every day. Cigarettes are now sold wrapped entirely in warning labels that tell you plainly that inhaling the cylinders held within will give you a fatal disease or your money back, and people are still buying them. People who have never lived a day on this planet without the knowledge of this inevitability are STILL STARTING to do this thing as I type this. People could not be warned about the dangers of this entirely legal item any more if the only way they could buy them in the store was if they had to recite the entire Surgeon General’s warning along with their brand before being given a pack. So telling people that the rectangle in their pocket that contains their entire life might kill them isn’t going to phase anyone.

Did you also know that every time you have ever used your phone ever, you’ve been doing it wrong, and Apple has desperately been trying to protect you this whole time. In the iPhone user manual it says that in order to not exceed FCC radiation exposure guidelines while using it as it’s designed to be used to, “keep iPhone at least 15 mm (5/8 inch) away from the body.” They’re fully aware what they have to say they told you about not cooking your brain, and they’re just as aware that you’re not going to read that, or if you did, you probably chuckled and thought how stupid it was. It doesn’t matter how impossible that would make the USE of your “phone” in what is supposed to be its primary function of listening to someone on the other end relaying verbal information through a speaker that wouldn’t work well enough if you implanted it in your skull. You’re holding it too close to not get cancer, so it’s your fault if you didn’t use their product as directed.

So in the end this new found knowledge is going to do exactly nothing. People are going to continue using their cell phones with the full understanding that it is slowly killing them and they’re simply not going to care. So really, is it actually better to know exactly what’s killing you, or to just go on assuming that everything is, knowing that you’re probably right anyway? In the meantime, if you want to get a hold of me, buy a stamp and make sure it’s worth a week for my response. I’ll be in the lime pit I’ve dug in my backyard and covered with moss and wishes. That ought to keep me safe, at least until scientists tell me that wishes give you AIDS…

Well, the good news is that the asshole sitting in front of you who took that call in the middle of the super dramatic and or touching moment during the last half hour of the future Oscar nominated Kung Fu Panda 2 this Sunday afternoon, and who’s whispering voice is louder than most toddler wails, is going to die a horrible screaming death, unable to recognize even his closest loved ones as the thing growing in his head lurches one final time and mashes all that was him against the inside of his skull and explodes.

The bad news: so will all of the rest of us otherwise thoughtful, conscientious movie goers.

You see, in the future, your cell phone has murdered you already.

In the industrialized world, everything we eat, make, or look at is killing us, so it should come as no surprise that something we’ve often been told is probably killing us is probably killing us. Tuesday the World Health Organization released the results of a study that suggests that cell phones may cause cancer and are categorized as being as hazardous as lead, engine exhaust and chloroform, making them basically as dangerous as anything else made in China.

See, cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. The kind that the article describes, saying it like it’s a good thing, as “like a very low-powered microwave oven.”

“What microwave radiation does in most simplistic terms is similar to what happens to food in microwaves, essentially cooking the brain. So in addition to leading to a development of cancer and tumors, there could be a whole host of other effects like cognitive memory function, since the memory temporal lobes are where we hold our cell phones.”

We are holding tiny microwave ovens to our heads and nuking our memories.

Introducing the new iTumorer 4GT! Only $599 with contract!

So what will be done? Well, if you said “With the swiftness of the angels choir, we, the consumer, will take this new found knowledge, given to us by those looking out for our own best interest so that we might better preserve our personal well being, and use it in the manner intended, to protect ourselves from those who might instead have their own personal gain as their most prescient thought. While those responsible for the manufacture and sale of these products will surely see that theirs is a dangerous gadget and will redouble their efforts to safeguard their precious customers, of whom their entire existence relies, to ensure that in the future they are delivering nothing but the finest quality product for the money because it is what the customer deserves, and what they certainly don’t deserve is a brain full of cancers.” then you were clearly born sometime during the reading of this article and that the well reasoned and insightful response of a mind not privy to the selfishness and stupidity of the world that awaits you, while certainly sounding measured and clear in your newborn head instead likely came out only as a mouth full of goo followed by a scream fueled by your first breath of life.

The truth is of course that this will change absolutely nothing. We’ve known since the advent of the cell phone that holding something against our head that is shooting invisible beams into space which are in turn being shot right back through self same head at the speed of light probably isn’t the best thing we could be doing to it, but that doesn’t stop us from buying the newest one the second we are legally allowed to. Knowing that our phones are cooking our gray meat isn’t going to keep us from using them. Sure, I might get myself a new hands free ear bud, but then the second that stops working I’ll be pressing my skull roasting rectangle back to my face and jerkeying my memories again.

The simple fact of the matter is that they could call the damned thing the iTumorer 4GT and there would be a line around the block for it come release day just so long as it had three cameras, weighed a 64th of an ounce less and had 64gigs to put all of the music that we’d forgotten why we liked because that part of our brain now had the texture of over defrosted chicken.

The benzene is what gives it that smooth, full body flavor.

You know how many cigarettes are still sold in the world every day? Neither do I, because I’ve got more important things to do than count cigarettes, but the point is, there’s still a lot, and what’s crazy is that new people begin smoking every day. Cigarettes are now sold wrapped entirely in warning labels that tell you plainly that inhaling the cylinders held within will give you a fatal disease or your money back, and people are still buying them. People who have never lived a day on this planet without the knowledge of this inevitability are STILL STARTING to do this thing as I type this. People could not be warned about the dangers of this entirely legal item any more if the only way they could buy them in the store was if they had to recite the entire Surgeon General’s warning along with their brand before being given a pack. So telling people that the rectangle in their pocket that contains their entire life might kill them isn’t going to phase anyone.

Did you also know that every time you have ever used your phone ever, you’ve been doing it wrong, and Apple has desperately been trying to protect you this whole time. In the iPhone user manual it says that in order to not exceed FCC radiation exposure guidelines while using it as it’s designed to be used to, “keep iPhone at least 15 mm (5/8 inch) away from the body.” They’re fully aware what they have to say they told you about not cooking your brain, and they’re just as aware that you’re not going to read that, or if you did, you probably chuckled and thought how stupid it was. It doesn’t matter how impossible that would make the USE of your “phone” in what is supposed to be its primary function of listening to someone on the other end relaying verbal information through a speaker that wouldn’t work well enough if you implanted it in your skull. You’re holding it too close to not get cancer, so it’s your fault if you didn’t use their product as directed.

So in the end this new found knowledge is going to do exactly nothing. People are going to continue using their cell phones with the full understanding that it is slowly killing them and they’re simply not going to care. So really, is it actually better to know exactly what’s killing you, or to just go on assuming that everything is, knowing that you’re probably right anyway? In the meantime, if you want to get a hold of me, buy a stamp and make sure it’s worth a week for my response. I’ll be in the lime pit I’ve dug in my backyard and covered with moss and wishes. That ought to keep me safe, at least until scientists tell me that wishes give you AIDS…

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